Selectional Preferences I
Most verbs prefer arguments of a particular type (e.g., the things that bark are dogs). Such regularities are called selectional preferences or selectional restrictions.
Selectional preferences are useful for a couple of reasons:
- If a word is missing from our machine-readable dictionary, aspects of its meaning can be inferred from selectional restrictions.
- Selectional preferences can be used to rank different parses of a sentence.